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Trajan's Engines

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Neville Morley
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Extract

It was never a foregone conclusion that the Roman Empire should have made any significant use of steam power. The basic principles of the steam engine were certainly known by the mid-first century A.D., as seen in the ‘wind-ball’ (aiölipile) described by Hero of Alexandria in his treatise on Pneumatica. Hero's device, in which a copper sphere was made to rotate by jets of stream when the reservoir of water underneath was heated to boiling point, clearly demonstrated that steam could serve as a source of propulsion. It was, admittedly, a very inefficient design: in modern reconstructions, either too much steam escaped through the joints or the joints had to be made so tight that friction became a serious problem. Such deficiencies were by no means insurmountable, and all the other elements necessary for the construction of a working steam engine – pistons, cylinders, an effective valve mechanism – can be found in Hero's writings or in those of his contemporaries.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 47 , Issue 2 , October 2000 , pp. 197 - 210
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 2000

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References

Notes

1. Hero, , Pneumatica 2.11Google Scholar. There is an English translation by B. Woodcraft (London, 1851); the passage is also reproduced in Humphrey, J. W., Oleson, J. P. and Sherwood, A. N., Greek and Roman Technology: a Sourcebook (London and New York, 1998), 28Google Scholar. Hero's device is discussed by, among others, Drachmann, A. G., The Mechanical Technology of Greek and Roman Antiquity (Copenhagen, 1963), 206Google Scholar; Landels, J. G., Engineering in the Ancient World (London, 1978), 28–33Google Scholar; White, K. D., Greek and Roman Technology (London, 1984), 195Google Scholar; James, P. and Thorpe, N., Ancient Inventions (London, 1995), 131–5Google Scholar.

2. Key works on the nature and limitations of ancient technology include Finley, M. I., ‘Technical innovation and economic progress in the ancient world’, Economic History Review 18 (1965), 29–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pleket, H. W., ‘Technology and society in the Graeco-Roman world’, Acta Historiae Neerlandica 2 (1967), 1–25Google Scholar; Reece, D. W., ‘The technological weakness of the ancient world, G&R 16 (1969), 32–7Google Scholar; White, K. D., ‘Technology and Industry in the Roman empire, Acta Classica 2 (1959), 78–89Google Scholar, and ‘Technology in classical antiquity: some problems, Museum Africum 5 (1976), 23–35Google Scholar. The most up-to-date discussions, including criticism of the assumptions of many earlier histories of technology, are found in a series of articles by Greene, Kevin: ‘Perspectives on Roman technology’, Oxford Journal of Archaeology 9 (1990), 209–19CrossRefGoogle Scholar; ‘The study of Roman technology: some theoretical considerations,’ in Scott, E., ed., Theoretical Roman Archaeology: first conference proceedings (Aldershot, 1993), 39–7Google Scholar; and ‘Technology and innovation in context: the Roman background to medieval and later developments,’ Journal of Roman Archaeology 7 (1994), 22–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Pliny describes the reaping machine in HN 18.296; it is discussed by Pleket, , ‘Technology and society,’ 15Google Scholar, and White, K. D., Roman Farming (London 1970), 448–9Google Scholar.

3. Quoted by Landels, , Engineering (n. 1), 29Google Scholar.

4. The idea that ancient science was disdainful of practical applications is particularly emphasized by Finley, , ‘Technical innovation’, 32–3Google Scholar. Book 3 of Hero's Pneumatica is generally concerned with devices which have practical utility; see White, , Greek and Roman Technology (n. 1), 180–3Google Scholar. Cf. Vitruvius 9, preface 6, on the application of Pythagoras' mathematical principles, and 10.1.4: ‘Now all machinery is generated by Nature, and the revolution of the universe guides and controls … Since then our fathers had observed this to be so, they took precedents from Nature; imitating them, and led on by what is divine, they developed the comforts of life by their interventions. And so, they rendered some things more convenient, by machines and their revolutions, and other things by handy implements. Thus what they perceived useful in practice they caused to be advanced by their methods, step by step, through studies, crafts and customs.’

5. See for example Hudson, P., The Industrial Revolution (London, 1992Google Scholar) and Wrigley, E. A., Continuity, Change and Chance: the Character of the Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

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9. We might compare discussions of whether the ancients possessed ‘economic rationality’: Carandini, A., ‘Columella's vineyard and the rationality of the Roman economy,’ Opus 2 (1983), 177–204Google Scholar; Finley, M. I., The Ancient Economy (London, 2nd edn 1985), 108–22Google Scholar; Mickwitz, G., ‘Economic rationalism in Graeco-Roman agriculture, English Historical Review 52 (1937), 577–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Neeve, P. W. de, ‘The price of land in Roman Italy and the problem of economic rationalism,’ Opus 4 (1985), 77–109Google Scholar; Rathbone, D. W., Economic Rationalism and Rural Society in Third-Century A.D. Egypt (Cambridge, 1991Google Scholar).

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12. Suetonius, , Nero 16Google Scholar. For a positive evaluation of this proposal, see Griffin, M., Nero: the End of a Dynasty (London, 1984), 130CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Suetonius, Vespasian 16 on his parsimony and 8–9 on his building projects. Jones, B. W., The Emperor Titus (London and Sydney, 1984), 143–6Google Scholar.

14. Frontinus, , De Aquis 1Google Scholar.

15. De Aquis 1, 87–8; Henderson, B. W., Five Roman Emperors (Cambridge, 1927), 169–74Google Scholar.

16. On the Diolkos ‘railway’, see Landels, , Engineering(n. 1), 182–3Google Scholar.

17. On the Piazza, see Meiggs, R., roman Ostia (Oxford, 2nd edn 1973), 283–8 and PI. XXIII–XXVGoogle Scholar.

18. On problems with using Italian rivers for transport, see Walker, D. S., A Geography of Italy (London, 2nd edn 1967), 270Google Scholar. Morley, , Metropolis and Hinterland (n. 8), 104–6Google Scholar, briefly discusses some of the laws aimed at maintaining the level of water in rivers used for transport.

19. Comparative material on the advantages and disadvantages of oxen: Ringrose, D. R., Transportation and Economic Stagnation in Spain, 1750–1850 (Duke, 1970Google Scholar); Leighton, A. C., Transport and Communication in Early Medieval Europe, A.D. 500–1100 (Newton Abbot, 1972Google Scholar); Langdon, J., ‘The economics of horses and oxen in medieval England,’ Agricultural History Review 30 (1982), 31–40Google Scholar.

20. Of course, that engine would have been lightly laden as it was heading away from the city. On Pliny's Laurentum villa, see Ep. 2.17.

21. Bennett, J., Trajan: Optimus Princeps (London and New York, 1997), esp. 138–60Google Scholar on building projects and 85–103 on the Dacian Wars.

22. On the Rhine–Danube corridor and its strategic importance, see Whittaker, C. R., The Frontiers of the Roman Empire: a Social and Economic Study (Baltimore and London, 1994), esp. 38–9, 43Google Scholar.

23. We might note the tendency, seen from archaeological data, to transport pottery thousands of miles from a state-owned pottery, rather than manufacturing it locally: Whittaker, , Frontiers (n. 22), 101–4Google Scholar.

24. On Trajan's Parthian campaigns, see Bennett, , Trajan (n. 21), 183–204Google Scholar.

25. On frontier defence, especially the idea of ‘defence in depth’ using a mobile strike force, see Luttwak, E. N., The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore, 1976)Google Scholar; contrast Mann, J. C., ‘Power, force and the frontiers of the empire,’, JRS 69 (1979), 175–83Google Scholar, who disputes the idea that this should be seen as a coherent military strategy rather than a short-term reaction to circumstances.

26. Since other indications suggest that the poem is supposed to be set in time of Domitian, these remarks are, to say the least, rather anachronistic; see Highet, G., Juvenal the Satirist (Oxford, 1954), 9–11Google Scholar, on the dating of the poems. Similar attacks on successful ex-slaves: 1.22–39, 1.102–20.

27. As early as Cato, the Roman agronomists had recommended choosing a villa with good transport links (Agr. 1.3–5; Varro, RR 1.16.1–3, 6). Some landowners are known to have built private roads (Potter, T. W., The Changing Landscape of South Etruria [London, 1979], 108Google Scholar) and quays (see Livy 40.51.2), so for a few a small local railway was a natural step. Of course, it is debatable whether such railways were constructed purely for productive purposes or whether they were also designed for pleasure and as a means of ostentatious display, an attitude to villa management which is exemplified in Varro's discussions of aviaries and fishponds (RR 1.4.1–2, 3.3.6, 3.4.3; cf. Morley, , Metropolis and Hinterland (n. 8), 90–5Google Scholar.

28. Suetonius, , Vespasian 18Google Scholar.

29. Fogel, R. W., Railways and American Economic Growth: Essays in Interpretative Economic History (Baltimore, 1964Google Scholar). Discussed by Ferguson, Niall, ‘Virtual History: towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past,’ in Ferguson, N., ed., Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuah (London, 1997), 17–18Google Scholar.

30. Whittaker, , Frontiers, 85–97Google Scholar, on the importance of supply lines in determining the location of frontiers.

31. Ferguson, ‘Virtual history’ (n. 29), discuses a range of reasons for hostility towards such questions. On the relationship between history and fiction, see Veyne, P., On History (Manchester, 1984)Google Scholar and Morley, N., Writing Ancient History (London, 1999Google Scholar).

32. The most sophisticated attempt so far, both in theoretical underpinning and in realization, is Hawthorn, Geoffrey, Plausible Worlds: Possibility and Understanding in History and the Social Sciences (Cambridge, 1991CrossRefGoogle Scholar); heavily (but to my mind unfairly) criticized by Ferguson (n. 29), 18–19.

33. Hawthorn, , Plausible Worlds (n. 32), 14Google Scholar.

34. The Virtual History collection offers alternatives to the English Civil War, the American Revolution, the partition of Ireland, the defeat of Germany in both World Wars, the Cold War, the assassination of JFK and the collapse of Communism. Similar subjects are covered by Squire, J. C., ed., If It Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History (London, New York, and Toronto, 1932Google Scholar); Snowman, D., ed., If I Had Been … Ten Historical Fantasies (London, 1979Google Scholar) and Merriman, J. M., ed., For Want of a Horse: Chance and Humor in History (Lexington, 1984Google Scholar). See also Toynbee, A. J., ‘If Alexander the Great had lived on,’ in Toynbee, , ed., Some Problems in Greek History (Oxford, 1969Google Scholar). One of the merits of Hawthorn's Plausible Worlds is that it explores economic and social history (what if plague had not been a serious cause of mortality in early modern Europe?) and art history.

35. All the works listed in n. 29, with the exception of Hawthorn's, were clearly intended, and certainly marketed, for a largely non-academic audience.

36. The quote is from Ferguson, , ‘Virtual history’ (n. 29), 86Google Scholar; his italics.

37. This ideological tendency is most explicit in Ferguson, , ‘Virtual history’ (n. 29), esp. 52–64Google Scholar. ‘The determinism of the nineteenth century was not, as might have been expected, discredited by the horrors perpetrated in its name after 1917. That Marxism was able to retain its credibility was due mainly to the widespread belief that National Socialism was its polar opposite, rather than merely a near relative which had substituted Volk for class’ (52–3).

38. Except in so far as a preference for traditional political history is ideologically motivated; see previous note.

39. On Marx, see Wood, E. M., Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism (Cambridge, 1995), 108–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Brenner, R., ‘Bourgeois revolution and transition to capitalism,’ in Beier, A. L. et al. , eds., The First Modem Society (Cambridge, 1989Google Scholar); contra e.g. Cohen, G. A., Karl Marx's Theory of History: a Defence (Princeton, 1978Google Scholar). Braudel's, own views are clear, in The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II(London, 1972Google Scholar), The Structures of Everyday Life: the Limits of the Possible (London, 1981Google Scholar) and ‘History and the social sciences: the longue durée,’ in On History (Chicago, 1980), 25–54Google Scholar. Discussed by Burke, P., The French Historical Revolution: the Annales School 1929–89 (Cambridge, 1990), 32–53Google Scholar.

40. A question whose contemporary relevance is quite as obvious as the old ‘what if Hitler had won?’.

41. One obvious example is the contrast between Roman agriculture and the supposed ‘medieval agricultural revolution’: propounded by White, L. Jnr, Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford, 1962Google Scholar) and Duby, Georges, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (Columbia, 1976Google Scholar); disputed by Pleket, H. W., ‘Agriculture in the Roman Empire in comparative perspective,’ in Sancisi-Weerdenburg, H. et al. , eds., De Agricultura: in memoriam Pieter Willem de Neeve (Amsterdam, 1993), 317–42Google Scholar, and Morley, , Metropolis and Hinterland (n. 8), 118–20Google Scholar.

42. See the articles cited in n. 2, particularly those by Finley and Reece.

43. The roots of this way of thinking lie deep. At the beginning of this century Max Weber, a major influence on Finley, was analysing the Roman Empire in terms of the ‘impediments’ it presented to the full development of capitalism; see The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations (trans. Frank, R. I.; London, 1976), 65–6, 358—65Google Scholar. The same assumptions also permeate ‘developmental economies’, where non-Western countries are encouraged (or compelled) to try to develop according to the blueprint laid down by the European experience; see Hill, P., Development Economics on Trial (Cambridge, 1986CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

44. See n. 2.

45. ‘The Poverty of Philosophy,’ in Marx, K. & Engels, F., Collected Works Vol. VI (London, 1976), 166Google Scholar. As noted above (n. 34), in his mature works (Grundrisseand Capital) Marx abandons this crude determinism.

46. For all the claims about the liberating power of technology like the Internet, economic power and political influence are if anything even more concentrated than before in the hands of multinational corporations. See e.g. Jordan, T., Cyberpower: the Culture and Politics of Cyberspace and the Internet (London, 1991Google Scholar) and Loader, B. D. et al. , The Governance of Cyberspace: Politics, Technology and Global Restructuring (London, 1997CrossRefGoogle Scholar).

47. Ballard, J. G., A User's Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London, 1996), 14Google Scholar: ‘S-f has been one of the few forms of modern fiction explicitly concerned with change – social, technological and environmental – and certainly the only fiction to invent society's myths, dreams and Utopias.’

48. In Excession (London, 1997Google Scholar).

49. Roman and Chinese systems of administration are contrasted by Hopkins, Keith, ‘Taxes and trade in the Roman Empire,’ JRS 70 (1980), 120–1Google Scholar.

50. On ancient environmental problems, see Hughes, J. D., Pan's Travail: Environmental Problems of the Ancient Greeks and Romans (Baltimore and London, 1994), esp. 112–29Google Scholar on industrial pollution and 181–99 on the environmental causes of the collapse of classical civilization.

51. See e.g. Turner, F. M., Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life (Cambridge, 1993), 231–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Vance, N., The Victorians and Ancient Rome (Oxford, 1997), 247–68Google Scholar. Of course, the twentieth century has also produced examples of this approach: see Rostovtzeff, M. I., Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2nd edn 1957), 536–8Google Scholar, or Walbank, F. W., The Awful Revolution: the Decline of the Roman Empire in the West (Liverpool, 1969), 114Google Scholar.

52. Contra Fukuyama, F., The End of History and the Last Man (New York, 1992Google Scholar), who argued that liberal-democratic capitalism has now conclusively ‘won’ the ideological struggle and is therefore recognized universally as the best possible way of organizing society.

53. The original version of this paper was delivered at the Classical Association Conference in Liverpool in April 1999. I am very grateful to everyone who made comments and suggestions on that occasion, especially Stephen Clark, Ahuvia Kahane, and Nick Lowe; I also wish to thank Geraint Osborn and Anne Morley.